TV Highlights

Actor/Executive Producer/Screenwriter

About This Person

From All Movie Guide: Best known as the urbane and cultured host of the Bravo network's <i>piéce-de-resistance,</i> Inside the Actors Studio (where his manner prompted one publication to refer to him as a "polymath linguist"), James Lipton also served as the dean emeritus of the Actor's Studio Drama School at Manhattan's New School University while headlining that iconic television program. The son of a graphic artist-cum-writer father and a teacher mother, Lipton was born in Detroit in 1926 and began a career stint in the early '40s on radio highlighted by an ongoing performance on the drama The Lone Ranger. He spent the postwar years in Paris, and briefly worked as a mec, or an arranger of client services for French prostitutes. In subsequent years, Lipton returned to the United States, married actress Nina Foch (whom he subsequently divorced), and embarked on twin careers as a writer and actor in the soap opera venue. He scripted episodes of programs including Guiding Light and Another World and ushered in a longstanding portrayal of a physician on Light.